(Swans - October 23, 2006)
The way we respond to death reveals our attitude to life. If we can
empathize the death of a child or a peasant in some far-flung field
thousands of miles away, we can appreciate the peculiar tragedy of a
promise -- a potentiality -- brutally stamped out. If we can experience
empathy with the loss of a person whom we do not know, whose name means
nothing to us and whom we cannot imagine except as a news item or a short
press obituary, we may still retain some sort of understanding about the preciousness, the rarity of that divine gift with which we are all blessed.

But what happens when we are engulfed by death -- when multitudes of The
Dead are reported in newspapers and on television as we are sitting down
to breakfast or returning home from work? What kind of
attrition-of-feeling comes into play when we learn that a half-dozen
people have been blown away by a suicide bomber rather than a hundred?
Is our notion of death somehow becalmed because there have been fewer
deaths where we expected more? Is it the quantity of deaths that has
become the measure of our grief? Do we tremble persistently at the idea
of 3000 dead but merely shudder momentarily at the death of one innocent
child in a foreign marketplace whose life has suddenly been cut short?

One of the consequences of people dying in great numbers is the way
it inures us to death, makes it commonplace and un-extraordinary. Its
ubiquity saps death of its horror -- just as the daily proximity of death
in the Nazi concentration camps made mass slaughter a commonplace --
even, at times, a subject for gallows humor.

In peace time, death is dignified and stately. We conduct our
memorial services, write respectful obituaries, bring flowers and
indulge in ceremonies of remembrance. Even if death has been brought on
by murder or violence, there is always a funeral service where the life
which has been extinguished is soberly considered and ceremonially
concluded. But in battle, when death is omnipresent, The Dead are hastily
disposed of; so much human debris which taunts us in regard to our own
mortality and guiltily reminds us that "there, for the grace of God -- or
the unpredictability of IEDs -- go we."

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demeaned death -- not only
because so many of us feel these were promising young lives callously
wasted, but because there are too many deaths to be observed -- to much
carnage to clear up, not enough reverential words to apply to piles of
corpses who remain faceless. It is a needful defense mechanism for the
administration to prevent the returning coffins of dead servicemen and women from
being photographed. There is a certain unassailable logic about such a
prohibition. If the public is asked on a daily basis to acknowledge the
enormity of the deaths brought on by the war, life, given normal limits
of endurance, simply cannot go on. It is hard enough at the best of
times for life to go on in the midst of death as it did during the Civil
War and every World War since, but during plagues, massacres, or incessant
carnage, too great a strain is put upon the sensitivities of a battered
civilian population. Since every day is a day in which deaths occur, we
must set aside every other day for burying the dead, and every third day
for mourning them. No sentient civilization can sustain the amount of
heartbreak all that demands. Concealment is therefore a useful option;
forgetfulness, a valuable anodyne; denial, a necessary means for survival.

In the last act of Shakespeare's Richard III, the victims of the
crookback's murderous wrath appear to him in a nightmare the night before
his fatal battle. They remind him of their bitter end and force him to
acknowledge the enormity of his crimes. Trying to shake off the
effects of that horrid dream, Richard says, in part:

My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree
Throng to the bar crying, "Guilty, guilty!"
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die, no soul will pity me—
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself.

I can imagine a similar kind of nightmare prompting a like meditation
from our own commander in chief. It would probably be a recurring
nightmare since for us deaths never cease to multiply and the terror,
fed by our own terrorism as well as that of our enemies, never abates.

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